May 5, 2016

We’re living in a world where we have willingly surrendered our privacy for the sake of making identification of ourselves, and our children more convenient for our government and for private businesses and entertainment venues like Disney World.

Students and faculty at Harrison Street Elementary School just love the new thumbprint scanner in the school’s lunch line, but civil rights experts are warning parents about serious privacy concerns with the technology.

The Geneva Unit District 304 replaced a different biometric scanner system for school lunch lines this year with devices from a local company, PushCoin Inc., that read students’ thumb prints to track their accounts, the Daily Herald reports.

“It’s good, because you don’t have to carry your own money or anything like that,” fifth-grader Quinlan Bobeczko told the news site. “It’s just there. Your thumb is easy, because you just have to put your thumb on (the device).”

Officials in several area school districts are watching District 304 in hopes of installing similar devices in their schools.

East Maine Elementary District 63 spokeswoman Janet Bishop said the district hired PushCoin Inc. this spring to begin offering the thumb scan option this month, and Lake Zurich Unit District 95 board president Doug Goldberg said schools there will implement the biometric scanners in the 2016-17 school year, the Daily Herald reports.

“I will tell you that many of the kids aren’t very good about keeping track of their ID cards,” Goldberg said. “And so moving to biometrics was felt to be sort of the next generation of that individual, unique ID. We’ll record their thumbprints, there will be thumbprint readers at all the cash registers, and they’ll simply come by and — bang — hit their thumbprint. It makes it faster and, also, there’s a lot less opportunity for any kind of misuse or fraud when they’re using biometrics.”

PushCoin Inc. allows parents to closely monitor their children’s lunch accounts through email updates, and the company’s CEO, Anna Lisznianski contends the scanners can help school officials use lunch time more efficiently.